Monday, January 25, 2010

Quarantine Earth: Still alive, just

Having survived the main road out of Lagos back to the airport, and once again having re-witnessed the madness of Nigerian drivers, I'm afraid I've succumbed to whatever the African equivalent of Montezuma's revenge is (Obama's revenge?). Yes, thoughts of the Ebola virus and malaria did randomly cross my mind as my temperature started shooting up, but it was probably just the usual bubble of viruses that makes up the usual air recirculation soup on the typical jetliner, with me having forgotten to take my Vitamin D3 supplements along on the journey.

Still, I think I'm over the worst.

And it's amazing how 'civilised' Britain looks and feels, after a week in West Africa. No doubt, after a couple of weeks back I'll once again be able to detect the flaws in the substrate of our socialist wonder state, but for the moment, it is simply good to breathe the naturally cool breezes of the fresh January air of Blighty and even better than that, to trust the water I pour onto my rehydration crystals.

Such are the simple pleasures of life.

While spending some time in my current febrile state, however, I have been wondering about the following question.

However has multi-cellular life survived for several billion years in the face of all this relentless destructive parasitism from uni-cellular and sub-cellular life-forms, such as viruses and other micro-parasites, such as prions?

(Go on, you can guess where this is going.)

Is evolution, that great game, so similar to free market competition, that we can imagine that successful entrepreneurial businesses are like large multi-cellular organisms, which despite being plagued by parasites, still manage to survive, adapt, and thrive, no matter how bad the environmental circumstances?

To wit. Are socialists not merely infected by the virus of Marxism. Can we actually classify these macro-parasites as viruses?

One certainly thinks of the train containing Lenin that the Germans sent into Russia, to deliberately 'infect' the Tsarist armies with revolution, to allow the Germans to concentrate on the Western Front. Was this a sort of 'virulent inoculation' of an infective viroidal agent which went horribly wrong, to end up killing more innocent human beings than any other modern virus ever has?

Yes, I think I like the analogy. Viruses are the socialists of the microscopic world and Socialists are the viruses of the macroscopic world. Both parasitize and destroy. Both need to be defended against and grow in incredible numbers when they have successfully invaded a host (even the formerly libertarian United States). And both are blind killers which eventually die off because they usually kill all of the available hosts which have not successfully defended themselves or evaded infection.

There's got to be a Sci-Fi novel lurking in there somewhere, called 'Quarantine Earth'?

Unfortunately, I'm not yet in a fit enough state to figure out exactly where.